


Pyriscence

by AwesomeJon



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Personal Growth, Redemption, Sacrifice, Violence, not a vindex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:28:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22686256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwesomeJon/pseuds/AwesomeJon
Summary: A true intent, completely unconveyed for reasons which mystify and baffle me, of certain previous work, was to explore the idea of a trigger being caused by trauma upon realizing the import of one's own violent and harmful acts -- to explore the harm violence does to the soul of the wielder. This intent was subverted and obscured by other, less savory concerns, the spell was ruined, the work remained incomplete.Here, the glyphs of this myth have been refined to their utmost and are presented to the reader as the pure offering of intent which they are. The author deeply regrets his previous error and any harm his lust of result caused in the reader.I dedicate this story to the crew of Apollo 1: Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee. To Valentin Bondarenko. And to the coming man.
Relationships: Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver & Sophia Hess | Shadow Stalker
Kudos: 7





	Pyriscence

**_February 12, 2011_ **

**_Brockton Bay, South Jersey_ **

Assault watches the footage, plays it back again to be sure he hasn’t missed anything. He always likes this game, when a new cape hits the scene -- analyze, yes. Field report, sure. Spot the inevitable Madcap client? This was one, for sure. 

She moves across the hall, past lockers, steps into the cafeteria. Black hair cascades down her shoulders. Her body is wraith-thin. Her glasses aren’t even crooked. The things that happened in the hall aren’t even bothering her.

_ Because they disappeared. He saw them disappear. This is A shit, easy, you can tell as soon as the video starts to play. Maybe even S. He saw her mistakes disappear, he doesn’t even know where they went, and it’s about to get worse. _

She moves with the purpose, the confidence, of someone who knows where the mistakes went. He’s taken to referring to them that way, because he likes his lunch and he likes his soul. The mistakes give him...questions, that he doesn’t want to have. Can bad men ever be good? Can sins disappear?

This is the part he  _ really _ doesn’t like. She steps into the lunchroom. The camera now has a forward view, facing her. There’s a sword, an ancient-looking sword, buried in her chest. It doesn’t come out the other side, out her back. There is no exit wound, no end to the pain, no release. Watching how she clutches the grip, this is important to her, he can tell.

_ He’s seen that look. _

She pulls it out. No. That’s really...inexact. Imprecise. It’s hard to explain what happens, though he’s freeze framing it, watching closely, desperate to understand --

The sword  _ apparates _ violently to a drawn position. At the same time, her hair becomes disheveled, her eyes haunted. He’d say terrified, but he’s seen that look.  _ Madcap _ , that’s a good word for it. Not terrified. A kind of bravery to deal with an earned fear. There are bloody streaks on her face, maybe cuts. Tears, he reckons, if he zooms in. 

What comes next is why he keeps rewatching. Not the way she suddenly  _ apparates _ whole body -- boys downstairs are saying Shaker, he’s just saying oh god oh fuck no way there can’t be any way -- to the last place they can prove she or Victim Charlie ever were -- 

But the words she says. 

“Sophia.” Her voice is sharp, straight, ragged. A wound. “Come be a hero.”

The girl, Victim Charlie for internal purposes, does. He sure wouldn’t have. She crawls out from under a table. Hands and knees. Apparate, retch, rewind, replay, watch again. Etching it into his dreams, trying to understand.

There’s just one thing, see. The video is an old security camera. It uses tapes.  _ It doesn’t have sound _ .

**_April 9, 2011_ **

**_Brockton Bay, SJ_ ** **_  
  
_ **

Yamada works late, now. A lot. Mostly because she’s seen the same footage everyone else has. She is a psychologist. Rational. Trauma has a reason. Parahumans have a reason. She thinks that reason is trauma. Others figure it’s evolution, maybe the judgment of God. Commie bioweapons. Everyone sees the world, and their place in it, through their trigger. Hers is a rational, baseline human attempt to understand trauma.

The girl wants her to. She knows that. What she would give for more than the footage she has -- for an understanding of why invisible watchers needed to hear that. She wakes up sometimes, looks at the clock. It’s 3:46 AM. That choked, grieving rasp echoing; “come be a hero.”   
  
She can’t sleep when this happens, because she doesn’t know which would be worse: that Hess never  _ had _ \-- or that the girl never  _ can _ . What she wouldn’t give for just five minutes -- but she can’t.

It is this reverie that she is jarred from. Her window smashes open, and  _ black fire _ crawls in. Hands and knees. Suffering. She hadn’t wanted to believe, she can’t  _ accept _ that a  _ child  _ could suffer so. Lights flicker, darkness falls. And she knows the worst is true. Soph -- god help her, she has to look away -- VC is  _ alive.  _ There’s a rasp -- flesh falls to the floor like tar.  _ Charlie _ looks up at her, hair strands ragged and stuck to her face with sweat, eyes black like cinders. She’ll never not be burning, no matter what they do. She can’t be touched, or Yamada will burn too. It’s a permanent shaker effect, they saw that with the tertiaries. With that poor boy Gregory. 

It’s horrible, and it’s cruel, and she wants five minutes alone with the girl who did this to someone she should hate, who gave her sympathy for the shadow. This time because she understands  _ enough _ . 

The rasp becomes a cry, and Jessica feels a hopeless inadequacy at the words. It too will haunt her dreams forever. “Please. She’s burning now. Help me -- help her.”

**_April 10_ **

They're both S class now. Because of Sophia's second trigger. Because she tried. 

The kill order is signed, sent out nationwide. Yamada prepared her resignation last night, it goes out  _ to the second  _ at the same time. Nationwide. Hannah doesn't approve. She merely understands. And she's promised further support. 

Downstairs, she imagines phones are blowing up. She's spoken to Danny Hebert before, she wonders if they told him. If he would choose to burn too. The second isn't even a question, so they didn't, of course. 

She plugs in the USB drive. Arms the dead man's switch. Wipes the BIOS, encrypts the drive. Assuming Colin didn't lie to her. And he wouldn't. Would he? 

Sets out a porcelain plate. Her grandmother's. Folds a paper crane, sets it down on the plate. A silent prayer. That someone won't burn. That it won't be for nothing. 

Lights a match. Sets the crane afire. Walks away. She likes to imagine that it cast a permanent shadow on the plate, on the desk, on the room, on the PRT, on the Protectorate. 

Yamada goes to be a hero. Yamada goes to burn. 

**_April 10_ **

**_Former Dockworker’s Union HQ_ ** **_  
_ ** **_  
_ ** She lies to the girl, in her mother’s voice. All voices are her mother’s, now, as all voices are indictments or accusations, as all voices are  _ mistakes _ . The girl is her first mistake, she cannot imagine how it must feel. She can only imagine, she must imagine. The delirium is a kind of fever, she’s not sure He-- Taylor is even listening, or that she can hear her. She’s been there. So she continues to read, from the burning pages.

_ "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. _

_ "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." _

_ "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?" _

_ "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." _

By the end, her voice is again choked with sobs. No one is coming to rescue them. Even if they did, that’s not what rescue means -- that’s not what it  _ can _ mean. There can only be fire.

If this is what regret feels like, it’s no wonder she has Taylor to thank for her first taste. 

**_February 11, 2011_ **

**_Winslow High School_ **

**_Brockton Bay, SJ_ **

Inside her fire, Taylor Hebert dreams. In her dreams, she no longer Shakes. Reality no longer bends around violence, anger, hate and pain. Instead, she plans for it to. She is not aware she is doing this, she cannot be. Regret, remembrance, grief -- all linear, causal. Reasoning to effect. 

The idea is simple. A knife, a real nice one she found in her Dad’s things. A KABAR, she thinks it’s called. A piece at a time, until they’re all as scarred  _ outside  _ as she is  _ inside _ . She used to think that if she got powers she might -- might -- go Carrie on the school. Might allow herself a taste of -- agency? Inside her fire, she’s no longer sure -- control. Control. Might be able to offload emotions, etch them like runes, shatter them like glass, into backs and faces and rip and tear and scream and --

It was insane. You can say it. She’s burning now. She saved the best for last, it was so simple, so elegant -- a loss of control, a fear -- had she started with  _ merely making Sophia Hess lose control _ she’d be dead by now, she knows it, she’d never have known...perhaps she’d never have had a chance to come back from this? Someone is reading to her, she needs it to be  _ Mom _ so it is -- she’s coming back, a piece at a time.

Anyway the knives. Would have been simplest with Madison, to cut around the tumor inside her first -- but no. Hatred and anger and a lust for revenge won out, she went for Emma. The other students in the hallway looked on in shock, she made a mistake a brutal mistake and Emma cried a harsh condemnation like a little lamb -- her hand slipped, brain eyes blade --

Her past slumped to the floor, her present looked on in horror. Her future  _ loomed _ ,  _ agreement _ worming its way toward  _ destination _ . Taylor Hebert was still in there, and Taylor Hebert had (quite rightly) judged herself to be a murderer, the slain merely a bully. Disheveled, covered in Emma’s blood, crying, she looks at all the witnesses, all the people she realizes she’s had to hurt. Her eyes flash, she’s okay, her hair is nice, her face is clean, she can  _ keep doing this  _ \--

To offload is to be dispassionate, to not judge anyone here, judgment is a waste, judgment won’t bring anyone back --

And she takes something precious from each family whose child attends Winslow, whose son or daughter or sister or brother is in that hall. And she puts them somewhere. Shakes the box, marches down the hallway. The hallway floor turns to black and white checkered tile, pillars covered in rust or something else line the walls, inexplicably in between lockers. More blood, this time Madison. She knows she’s not okay, she enjoys it. Flowers grow where blood spurts. It takes a while. She sees, in a locker, a flicker of a mask, a black shadow. It’s the empty locker next to Sophia’s, and suddenly so many things make sense. Like why Sophia isn’t saving anyone here. Shadow Stalker is a coward in a mask! No wonder! And that makes what’s going to happen to her all the more fitting, now doesn’t it.

**_Feb 11_ **

**_Elsewhere_ **

Sophia wakes up. She’s beginning to regret coming to be a hero. The apparation made her sick. This isn’t Earth, of any kind. It’s empty, flat. No stars, nothing to define her position as “on the floor” other than cold smooth against her back. No tile, no pillars, no flowers, and thank  _ fuck _ there’s not any blood. She can’t move. She’s in a shaker dimension, it’s no wonder. Hebert is too strong. If she had only known, she might have stopped, and now it’s too late...too late to take it back. Maybe too late to fight.

Her head inclines up. Not her moving. The conscious decision to  _ look _ follows. Hebert, pristine, beautiful, as if violence doesn’t make you ugly, as if she doesn’t  _ know _ this by now, as if she’s got the gall to  _ ignore _ it --

Speaking now. No, letting her speak. Inside this horrible  _ empty _ they are one. Bully and victim. The  _ ice  _ in Sophia’s gut is that she doesn’t know which is which. The  _ fire _ is that it doesn’t matter anymore. 

“What...the...shit, Hebert.” 

The girl smiles cruelly. "Ever heard of necklacing?" 

Sophia gasps. Fear is such a rare thing for her, it's a violation, she'd rather have not known — 

"I thought you might have. You're such a connoisseur, I wanted to give you what you're worth."

"Fuck you." Sophia spits, but unlike the  _ shaking  _ it's an act. Hollow and empty, but raw. "Don't even have any tires."

Taylor shakes her head. "Don't need any, now."

And Sophia is burning, burning, burning, it hurts  _ so much  _ and —

There's a brief flash, she thinks she's in the school, she's touching people, flailing, they're screaming, everyone is screaming —

She's gone again, now a rocky plain, an empty red sky, save for an enormous and looming spiral galaxy, and she'd be all  _ for _ the aesthetic here if she thought the artist knew what empathy even  _ was _ , but —

**_March 15, 2011_ **

**_Brockton Bay, SJ_ **

**_Docks_ **

She's been burning for a long time. It's all she knows, now. She doesn't see Taylor, but she can sense her. She's inside her fire and it will always hurt. For her, it's tinged strongly with guilt. For Taylor, she doesn't know. She hopes so. 

She looks around, sun hurting her eyes. Cold air biting in ways as unfamiliar as welcome. She's not sure she has clothes anymore, but it doesn't matter. She hurls herself off the pier, into the water, screaming. 

Two things. One: she can still hear her own screaming underwater. Two: she's still burning. It hurts less, though. 

It takes her a week to come out of the water. She is shadow and flame and secret pain and a wound made not to heal — she can breathe underwater, she's fully conscious, fully analytical. She can probably breathe in space. When she comes out of the water the ground is still burning. 

It takes her a week to learn to walk again, in a useful way. Almost April. The Merchants are flammable. All of them. She can survive a truck impact. Or three. 

She wonders what Taylor can survive. She's not sure it even matters. It's her fault, after all. All of it. 

**_March 15, 2011_ **

**_Brockton Bay, SJ_ ** **_  
_ ** **_Expressway_ **

Another thing Taylor had always wanted to do when she got superpowers: leave the city. Let the dead bury their own dead, solve problems somewhere else. If she was Alexandria level good, maybe stop the Nine. Ha. The Nine, almost nothing to her now. She didn’t make any more  _ mistakes _ , the mistakes she had made sat well with her now. She was over that. The sword had pierced her own soul, she was her own messiah -- wielding it gave her strength like she’d never  _ felt _ . 

She still didn’t feel it. But that was beside the point. She couldn’t leave, if Miss Militia kept camping on overpasses and pointing stupid guns at her --

‘Taylor, I know you don’t believe me, but no one wants to hurt you more than you’ve already been hurt.”

Taylor shook her head, laughing bitterly. That of course wasn’t true. Someone did, and of course Sophia would too. But instead of the war cry of Boudicca, out came  _ Zenobia _ as a choking sob, led through the streets in chains --

“I killed everyone. Everyone who isn’t gone. Or burning. Greg. Greg did nothing, he’s burning.”

Miss Militia is kind, behind the mask. The gun says otherwise, but -- she would have done something, if she’d have known, couldn’t she have? “You don’t trigger because you’re winning, Taylor. You were winning the fight that didn’t matter to you, but you lost the one that --”

She’s right, of course, and there’s a flicker, a shift. A broken girl is covered in Emma’s blood, sobbing, hair tangled with tears. Then another flicker, and  _ officer down _ goes off on every radio channel from here to Boston, a hundred times --

_ She’s a whirlwind in a thorn tree, and she has no intention of coming around yet. _

**_April 9, 2011_ **

**_0630 hrs_ **

**_Brockton Bay, SJ_ ** **_  
_ ** **_  
_ ** Then one day, one moment, the form lapses. She stops being strong, stops being hard, stops  _ hating _ everything and herself. Sobs, under an overpass. She can’t stand this, she can’t submit to judgment, she can’t go back to being herself on purpose, she can’t admit she’s changed too much --

She will always be broken, now. This truth bites off on her lower lip, copper red. She relishes it, and someone else’s blood joins Emma’s on her shirt. Someone who matters less to her than...than Emma did, now. But acceptance brings clarity. There’s someone else who’s accepted that they’re a monster, who had accepted they were a cowardly one, before she made them “come be a hero”, as if Liveleak wasn’t already convinced she was the love child of Jack Slash and the Siberian, as if old security cameras have  _ sound _ \-- just because she said that why did she say that she was so angry and it sounded so cool she won’t get the arrow back --

Okay, Taylor, breathe. Regather your consciousness. Form yourself hard, hard enough to work on getting back to being okay -- new okay, darker okay, cowardly monsters cower,  _ ghost dancers slay together _ \--

And the first thing to do is to make the new normal mean something. To make the hatred, the anger, the pain, the fear, the murder, the  _ having murdered _ and even the  _ having been angry _ things that can do some good now, for someone somewhere --

And it’s irrational, but the way she has to do this is she has to find Sophia Hess. She’s picked up rumors, and she’s probably hiding in the old Dockworker HQ -- it’s a good choice, really. Place is empty, huge, has facilities. A swimming pool. 

Maybe Sophia will send her away, maybe she won’t. But as she approaches the steps up to the door, hears the screaming coming from inside, she knows she has to try. To touch, to burn.

It’s only fair. She can still conquer, she can still dash the world to pieces underneath her feet, she can still  _ win  _ \-- but Sophia’s in pain. And if it’s ever going to be a fair fight for her, Taylor needs to be in pain and burning too. At least a little bit.

And. As horrible as it feels, as empty, as much grief as there is for the girl who hadn’t broken yet, who still has skin, wholeness, blood, tears -- if that girl’s to stay alive, she can never take this back.

That cruel punishment is what propels her up the stairs. She doesn’t think -- maybe she’s the only one who wants to punish herself. Maybe getting her mess all over Sophia is about her.

_ It’s just a sick cycle at this point. She’s taking steps to make sure it never ends. But unlike the bullying, unlike the murder of Emma Barnes, she’s chosen it. She’s chosen it. She’s chosen something. She’s chosen the companionship of the monster most like herself. And that, in her mind, is how she’s going to start to be okay. _

  
  



End file.
